


Wish you were here

by maybetwice



Category: Pitch (TV 2016)
Genre: 2020, COVID-era, Drunken Confessions, Epistolary, F/M, Long-Distance Friendship, Mutual Pining, Texting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:33:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28134732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/maybetwice
Summary: Ginny has planned for the end of Mike's career for years. She didn't plan that she couldn't be there for it.
Relationships: Ginny Baker/Mike Lawson
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Wish you were here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elegantstupidity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegantstupidity/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, elegantstupidity!

~

“It’s like living Groundhog Day,” Ginny told Mike on the phone one night in late July, while he was locked in his hotel room in Phoenix and she was home in San Diego. Home, sort of. Just for the time being, or whatever it meant to be calling Mike’s house home.

“You know, same day, over and over?”

“I’ve seen the movie,” Mike told her irritably, and she could hear him start to bite out something else, probably to ask her if she was even alive when it came out. She could even hear the moment he rolled his eyes and snapped the blinds shut. “The season always starts to feel a little like Groundhog Day, even now.”

“But you’re playing,” Ginny argued. “And I’m living the same offseason day over and over. Wake up, warm up, weights, breakfast, ten mile run, ten hours of daytime tv, sleep.” 

“Okay, granted,” Mike acceded to her. “You win. Eternal offseason is way worse than whatever the fuck I’m doing right now.”

~

He would know, after all. The only difference between a day for Ginny Baker in late July and the previous four months is that Mike was there with her before, living the same quarantine day over and over while she lived in his guest room.

It had seemed like the sensible thing to both of them when spring training shut down in March. Without knowing how safe flying might be, Ginny asked if she could hitch a ride back to San Diego in Mike’s absurd, luxury SUV. He made a lot of smoke about how he’d have to listen to top-40 radio the whole way, that he wouldn’t get a chance to catch up on his podcasts, but she hadn’t missed the way he straightened her team duffel in the back, like it was something that belonged there. 

Somewhere between Phoenix and Yuma, he’d suggested that they quarantine together at his house. It was bigger, Mike insisted, and it would hardly be a problem. They might even go entire days without seeing one another.

“I have an apartment,” she’d pointed out anyway, thinking of her trendy loft that she’d barely seen during the offseason, having spent most of it recovering from Tommy John and visiting a physical therapist on the other side of the country. “And it’s only going to be a couple of weeks.”

Within a few hours, Mike convinced her of the rosier logic to living in his house. A couple of weeks with a home gym and a pool to keep up with her rehab plan didn’t sound bad, after all. Maybe even a delay to the season would make it possible for Ginny to finish rehabilitation and start a game early in the season. If it even occurred to her that it was a dangerous situation to put her heart in, Ginny shook it off. It had been years since they tacitly agreed that an almost-kiss could be forgotten. Especially one when they’d barely known each other more than a few months, when they’d been drinking, and when they were both a little emotionally charged. It was nothing.

And so it was four months of mostly nothing, really. If Mike looked at her too long, then he was probably just lost in thought, worrying about whether or not he’d actually played the last game of his career. If Ginny had weirdly intense dreams about kissing Mike in the pool, or his gym, or in the middle of a baseball diamond, well, those could be easily attributed to anxiety and ignored. A cold shower first thing in the morning took care of that before she went downstairs to set up for the workout-of-the-day her trainer texted her while Mike made breakfast for them both.

By the time the season started, Ginny was still toiling away at her physical therapy, rebuilding pitch speed and fighting off inflammation in her new elbow tendon, and Mike couldn’t bring himself to give up on his last season. 

After those two maxims were established, everything else just seemed obvious to them: Ginny stayed in his boxy, modern mansion with a garage full of sports cars, and Mike took her loft close to Petco in downtown San Diego. Six months after Ginny had thrown some things into a suitcase and grabbed her lone, sad houseplant, it had started to seem like Ginny Baker, starting pitcher for the San Diego Padres, was a figure from another life she’d dreamed up.

~

Another night, another long phone call. Ginny yanked out her hair tie and flopped backward onto the couch, jostling the phone against her ear when she replaced it, glad she’d washed the dishes after the game ended so she could talk until exhaustion finally set in for one of them and they hung up with sleepy good nights.

“Are you back from the game?”

“Back in the shoebox,” Mike confirmed with a deep groan of effort. Ginny closed her eyes and pictured him in her kitchen, shuffling around the contents of her refrigerator. Everything she’d left in there back in February was long gone, replaced with a few dozen eggs, chicken breasts, and a crisper full of vegetables, the elements of the few things Mike knew how to cook. Similarly, his kitchen was now stocked with pre-made meals from a delivery service that dropped them outside the door twice a week.

“Rough slide from Malone today,” she observed. The Mariners’ outfielder had taken a chance on an error and broke from second to steal home. His desperate slide caught Mike in the shin when he crouched to tag him out. Though they’d both walked it off after an angry exchange, Ginny hadn’t missed Mike’s slight limp back to the dugout, even on the other side of a televised broadcast.

“Hurts like hell.” Mike’s smug grin carried through the phone: “I got him out, though.”

“You should have called for a cutter in the first place,” she said, slotting her fingers through her hair and tugging until the curls loosened. “Ramirez can’t stand breaking balls. A fastball was asking for him to swing for downtown.”

“You’re not in charge here, Baker.” In the lull, she could hear him moving around her apartment, bumping into the awkward kitchen island that had left dozens of bruises on her hip over the past few years. “Where do you keep your whisky?”

“Gross,” she answered instantly, tucking her chin into her sweatshirt as she finger combed her hair, massaging her sore scalp where her ponytail had been pulled too tight. “Did you finish my tequila?”

“Left plenty for you,” he promised. Ginny could hear the minute he slumped into the chair by the floor-to-ceiling window that stretched the length of her living room. 

She’d never been there to see him do it, but having listened to him do it a few dozen times, it was easy to imagine the easy routine Mike followed in parallel to her own. Ginny watched the game on TV and, when he’d showered after the game, Mike called Ginny from wherever he was in the country. She spread herself over his angular couch, Mike took the chair by the window in her apartment, and they pretended that there wasn’t somewhere between thirty and a thousand miles of companionable silence hanging on the line between them.

Air blew over his microphone, long and slow, like he’d been holding in the tension all day, just to release it now with her. Four years since she met him, and Ginny still sometimes feels like the giddy, anxious girl meeting her favorite player. The part of her that’s still twelve years old with Mike’s poster on her wall can hardly believe that she can consider him her friend and confidante, when that seemed impossible her rookie year. Ginny wouldn’t trade that for anything, something she’d had to remind herself more than once over the years. Whatever else she might have wanted him to be at some other point wouldn’t be worth losing this easy relationship.

But it would change soon, whether she wanted that or not. And _then_ what would they be?

“Season’s passing by really fast,” she said at last. Now that it was, it didn’t seem as much like the end of the world that she’d sat out the season. Not like it did just a month or two before, while she agonized over news from the union with every buzz of her phone. But even if it wasn’t the end of the world, it was still the end of something else she didn’t know how to name. Maybe she didn’t want to.

Instead of thinking about what she was going to miss, or how endings are just beginnings in disguise, or even just waiting to see what Mike would say in response, Ginny blurted out: “I should be there with you.”

“No,” Mike interrupted before she could finish, in a slow and rational tone. “You should be right where you are: letting that arm heal. You aren’t missing anything. None of this counts.” 

“None of it except it’s your last year,” she said, chewing on her lip and staring up at the ceiling. They’d tried avoiding this conversation all year long, since pitchers and catchers reported for spring training. They talked about their fears, and they talked about Ginny sitting out the season, about Mike making the best out of what he had, and everything else in-between. They agreed on the house swap. Then they talked every single day, but never about this.

“They’d let you come watch the last game,” Mike offered, sounding a little strained on the other line.

Ginny would give almost anything to be at Petco for Mike’s last game, and everyone knows it. No one would think twice if she went and sat up in the seats, just to watch the game. It was possible, but it felt wrong in too many ways. Ginny could still remember watching Mike’s Major League debut next to her dad. Watching his last game seems like it would be acknowledging that it’s over, that it’s all going to change for them.

“Al would absolutely kill me if I did,” she said, perhaps too casually. 

“It’s not his clubhouse anymore. You should be there.”

“You know that’s not really true,” she answered immediately, and if Mike minded that she was deflecting, he didn’t say anything about that, either. “Besides, I’m sure MLB would have something to say about it. They’ve been pretty brutal to players who sat out the season.”

“Too fucking bad for them,” Mike said with an audible eye-roll. “Come, Ginny. If you can, I want you to be there.”

~

**Mike:** Oscar came to have a talk in the clubhouse today.

 **Ginny:** uh oh  
**Ginny:** did you tell him that Chicago probably doesn’t want you this time??

 **Mike:** You’re hilarious.

 **Ginny:** Well, you already announced you’re retiring, right?

 **Mike:** He wants me to consider a coaching gig next season.

 **Ginny:** and?

 **Mike:** Well, it might interfere with my plan to spend summers in Sardinia.

 **Ginny:** no question about it, then.  
**Ginny:** don’t forget about me when you’re in Italy

 **Mike:** As if I could ever. Maybe you’ll be there with me, anyway.

~

Without the usual markers of the season to pass time, September arrived with little fanfare. Baseball seasons usually stretched leisurely through half the year, burning slow in April, May and June, and then turning to a conflagration of excitement in August and September. This year, though, the season felt like it had barely started before it was almost over, and the Padres were playing hotter than ever.

“It’s almost like the normal rules don’t apply,” Mike explained from Denver. “No one’s afraid of the baseball gods this year.”

“Normal rules don’t apply this year,” Ginny told him, scrutinizing her fingernails. “Not that I’m not happy for all of you, but I sure wish I was there.”

Mike was silent long enough for Ginny to guess that he was deciding what the right thing to say was. She didn’t wait for him to figure it out. 

“It’s not like I’m worried that you all don’t need me to be great, or like I’m afraid I’m dragging the team down.” Except that was exactly what she was worried about it, and Mike knew it as well as she did.

“We didn’t make the playoffs for ten years before you were on the team,” Mike pointed out dryly. “I don’t think it’s your pitching that kept us from getting there the last four.” 

“Right, but fans don’t think that way,” Ginny pressed, forgetting that she was trying to argue that she wasn’t worried about being obsolete.

Mike sighed, and she remembered again that this wasn’t the most sensitive conversation to have with him. “Ginny.”

“Michael.” Ginny stuck her tongue out at the ceiling, as if she could see the way he screwed up his face in disgust at his full name. She’s being dramatic and selfish when it’s _Mike’s_ career that’s actually ending.

“Oscar isn’t going to fire you because you got completely routine baseball pitcher surgery and sat out a whole third of a season.”

“Well, when you put it like that,” she began, trailing off in mock thoughtfulness. “I better not forget to make my annual offerings to the baseball gods, just to be sure.”

“Do mine for me, too,” Mike suggested. “Maybe I’ll have some better luck if you do.”

~

ESPN - now  
BREAKING: San Diego Padres foil St. Louis Cardinals’ postseason hopes in Wildcard Game 3 shut-out.

~

**Mike:** Officially kicked the can on that coaching gig.

 **Ginny:** put your phone down and go drink some champagne with the rest of the team, you fucking nerd

~

Ginny knew before she picked up her phone from the coffee table that it was Mike calling, and she slid her thumb across the screen to answer without looking.

“Why are you calling me right now?” she demanded, fumbling for the remote to turn down the volume on SportsCenter, where an exhilarated anchor was recapping Game 3 of the wildcard series.

“Didn’t seem right to be celebrating without you, Baker,” he shouted back into the phone, though Ginny could hear him fine. She first thought the noise in the clubhouse must have been too loud for him to hear himself think, and she could make out the low thumping bass of someone’s reggaeton in the background. Then Mike laughed again, shouted something in Spanish to Livan, and Ginny knew then that he must have taken her text to heart.

“Is that Ginny?” 

There was the rustling sound of hands brushing across the microphone during a scuffle for the phone, and then Livan was in her ear with an ear-splitting whoop of joy. Shouts on the other end rose like a swelling wave before Ginny held her phone a few inches away from her ear as deafening cheers carried across the line.

“Baker, fix your elbow and get back here.”

“Knitting tendons as fast as I can, Duarte,” she laughed, bright and sincere.

“I’ll save some champagne for you.”

The rustling was back again as Mike wrestled his phone back from Livan.

“Holy shit, you’re all drunk.” Her face actually hurt from grinning as hard as she was, feeling out of place sitting alone on the couch in the dark. She expected to be sad, but now that the Padres had won the wildcard series, it was incredible how little jealousy she actually felt about it. She was only sorry that she wasn’t there with them. “Tell Blip to take your phone away from you.”

“No way,” Mike said with a feral laugh. “He’s on the phone with Evelyn right now, anyway.”

With a pang, Ginny realized that Mike and Blip would hardly be the only ones calling their parents and wives and children and all the other people who would ordinarily be celebrating with them in the clubhouse. And, she realized with a second jolt, Mike had chosen to call her. 

“Fuck, Ginny,” he said with a whooshing exhale over the receiver. “I wish you were here for this. Fuck. I miss you so goddamn much.”

Ginny opened her mouth to say, _you talk to me all the time, Lawson,_ but that wasn’t what he meant, and she realized that she couldn’t joke about it, anyway. Instead, she choked on air instead, her throat working around a hard lump that suddenly formed in her windpipe.

“I miss you guys, too,” she said at last, praying that she sounded normal when she did. “Why don’t you give me a call whenever you get back to the apartment?”

“Won’t be more than an hour,” Mike said in a rush. “Love you.”

The screen flashed as he hung up and Ginny stared down at her phone, as though she’d imagined the whole conversation. The game was barely over and he’d had a lot of champagne. It didn’t mean anything. 

Ginny knew Mike probably as well or better than anyone else in the world. It was only that he was drunk and excited, high on adrenaline from winning a baseball game, and had been entirely, completely honest in that momentary slip.

~

Mike didn’t call that night, but Ginny didn’t expect him to, anyway.

After staring out the window of his guest room for three hours, a hundred thoughts whizzing through her head like rapid-fire fastballs, Ginny threw off her comforter and walked down the cold hallway in her bare feet.

The house was Mike’s, but it hadn’t ever really felt like him. It was his picture that hung in the stairwell, a large scale print of his Body Issue portrait, and his memorabilia in a glass case at the end of the hall, but all of that felt like Mike Lawson, the baseball player. Mike Lawson, her friend, wasn’t nearly as confident and self-assured as his alter-ego. 

The door to Mike’s bedroom was unlocked when she pushed it open. The decor was the same as a lot of the rest of the house: modern and 2015 trendy, when he’d probably hired an interior designer to put the space together without his input. The dresser by the window had a line of framed photos that she realized didn’t look like they’d come out of a sports catalog or an art show. Personal candids of people she didn’t recognize, moments that must have been important to him. The last one was of Mike, at least a decade younger, clean-shaven, and wearing a suit she recognized from magazine coverage of his wedding. His laugh was genuine, she realized. Whatever had happened in the years that followed, Mike had been truly happy the day he married Rachel.

“What am I doing?” Ginny asked, the echo of her own voice startling her into looking up into the dark. She was so used to being alone in the house, she’d forgotten how quiet it was.

The covers of his bed were a little dusty, but the room smelled a little like Mike had just stepped out of sight, not at all like he’d been absent for months. Ginny smiled a little wryly as she peeled back the covers and climbed between the sheets, pressing her nose into his pillow and inhaling deeply. If she suspended all her other senses, it was almost like Mike really was there. 

_I miss you so goddamn much,_ he’d said to her. 

There wasn’t any harm if Ginny admitted the feeling was entirely mutual. Nothing would happen. Nothing could happen. It was the last coherent thought she had before dropping directly back into one of those dreams she’d tried for six months to forget.

~

SportsCenter: **NLDS Game 1 preview: San Diego is hot, but are the Dodgers hotter?**

~

They hadn’t talked about his drunken declaration after the Cardinals series. Ginny had the impression that Mike probably remembered it just as well as she did, but if he wanted to go back to saying nothing, pretending it didn’t mean anything, well, what was different about that? She’d done it for four years, hadn’t she?

That was the other thing she’d realized: she’d been faking it for four years straight. She hadn’t forgotten how close she’d come to kissing Mike. She hadn’t stopped wanting it, she’d only gotten closer to him and pretended harder. Ginny was stubborn and iron-willed, and if she wanted something, she’d always just put her head down and done it. It was a whole theme of her therapy sessions, how easy it was for Ginny to keep herself from wanting the things she really wanted, if she’d already decided they were somehow inconvenient.

Being actually-for-real in love with Mike Lawson was definitely inconvenient. 

Not knowing what to do about it until she had the chance to talk to someone about it, Ginny just went back to shoving it down. This wasn’t the kind of love she’d felt with Trevor, with boyfriends or even dates where she sort-of liked the guy. There were actual stakes involved here, things that could be ruined for good.

Better not to face it. Not yet, at least.

~

**Ginny:** I really want to hate the Dodgers.

 **Mike:** But you don’t.

 **Ginny:** No, I don’t.  
**Ginny:** Sorry.

 **Mike:** What's to be sorry for? It’s an honor to have my childhood team hand me my ass in my first playoff appearance in fourteen years.

~

“I guess this isn’t the worst way to go out,” mused Mike over his green smoothie the morning after Game 2 of the NDLS.

“Getting swept in the postseason isn’t the worst way to go out?”

“It’s the postseason. My career didn’t end on a flyout in September. Anything else is pretty good.”

"You aren't usually this upbeat, old man."

Mike's laugh barked across the line. "It's weird, right? But now that I'm here, it's like playing with house money."

"Let me know if you still feel that way at Game 3."

"Have you tried turning your jersey inside out? Try it for the first couple innings for me."

"They hate nudity on national television," Ginny quipped before explaining: "I called Oscar about going to the game tomorrow. So, I'll get to see you."

“You mean I’ll get to see you,” Mike corrected, suddenly coughing on his smoothie. “Since you’ve been watching me on TV nonstop for the last three months.”

Ginny couldn’t help her lopsided smile at that. “I’ll make myself presentable.”

“Damn right you will,” Mike said, and she could hear the slap of his palm against her kitchen counter. “Wear your finest leggings. Show some decorum for the occasion.”

~

Ginny wore jeans and a soft-knit tee she’d bought at a concert she went to with Cara two years before tucked into the hem. Even with a face mask and a Padres cap pulled over her eyes, she felt conspicuous. There were a handful of people scattered through the seats, a few familiar faces from the team staff, a couple of the owners. She avoided all of them, eschewing seats behind the dugout in favor of seats in the 200s under the scoreboard.

When Ginny went to games as a kid, these were the seats her dad always picked. From there, he'd point out the differences between the pitches coming off the mound, the shifts in play. He could call the next play without looking up from his scorebook.

She'd deliberately come to the game late, just before the first pitch, just like she would if she were anyone else. Just like she would if Will or their dad was with her. It was already strange enough to be at Petco without using the players’ entrance. It was easier to lean into the unfamiliarity of the experience, to let it all be alien to her.

 _Maybe it won’t be the last game, anyway,_ she texted Evelyn, who she knew was working on a paper for her MBA.

 _I hope it is,_ came her instant response. _Is that awful?_

Blip hadn’t been home since July, choosing instead to rent an apartment with a couple other players over taking chances at getting Evelyn or the kids sick. It was the right decision, and Evelyn had been the one to arrive at it, but Ginny knew they missed each other. She wasn’t the only one who’d had a lonely year.

No, it wasn’t awful for Evelyn to want the season to end for the Padres so Blip could come home. Ginny quietly hoped this would be the end, too. Waiting wasn’t something she’d ever been very good at. Waiting for the unknown was even worse.

~

ESPN - now  
BREAKING: Dodgers sweep Padres to advance to NLDS.

~

Ginny rose from her seat the instant Mike stood up from behind the plate, the dull echo of the ball hitting the center of his glove echoing through the empty stadium. She couldn’t make out his expression, not with the mask pulled down over his face, and not from the distance between them. He passed the ball from his glove into his bare hand, staring at it for a few seconds without moving. The Dodgers’ batter, the one who’d just struck out, ducked his head to say something into Mike’s ear before leaving for the visitor’s dugout with the rest of his celebrating teammates.

Mike lifted his head and even with the whole baseball field between them, she felt his eyes searching for hers.

Ginny didn’t think there was anything she could do that would feel right in that moment. This was the end of his career. What could she say or do that would demonstrate that she understood the gravity of this moment, that he was sharing it with her? 

Nothing. Ginny could only trust that Mike knew. At last, she lifted a hand awkwardly and flashed the hand sign for the next pitch.

The tension lifted from his shoulders. Mike lifted his mask, tipped his cap to her, and jogged off the field.

And that was the end.

~

"You saw that play in the Dodgers game last night, didn't you?"

Ginny tucked her phone into her neck, wrestling with Mike's corkscrew for a few extra seconds before she hummed in agreement. It had seemed like, when the season was over, he would just come back to his house and they would either resume their routine at his house, or she would go back to her apartment. But, of course, he’d insisted on quarantining for two weeks at her apartment before coming back. 

"I thought you weren't watching the rest of the postseason."

"What else am I going to do in quarantine?"

"You could read." The cork finally popped and Ginny dropped the awkward contraption onto the counter. "I have books. Did you forget your reading glasses?"

"Forgot them in my cubby. No use going back for them now. Probably got cleared out the minute I left Petco." 

"Too bad. I'm pretty sure there are some romance novels in there somewhere."

“Are they the dirty kind?”

“You’ll have to look and find out,” she bantered back. They definitely were the dirty kind, but Ginny tried not to think about Mike discovering that part of her library. At least, not while she was on the phone with him.

 _Dangerous,_ she thought to herself as she did, steadying the bottle before pouring herself a glass. She was playing with fire, drinking and flirting with Mike. Mike's call the night the Padres clinched the wildcard spot was still bright in her memory, nearly a full month later. What she planned to do about it wasn’t as clear, though. After years of pretending, all Ginny knows is that she can’t do nothing anymore.

"What have _you_ been reading the last three months, then?"

"Don't be like me," she grinned, corking the wine and examining the bottle one more time. “I’ve watched an unreal amount of SportsCenter.” 

“Don’t drink all my wine,” he warned, shuffling around in the chair by the window. “At least, not before I get back there.”

“We drank all your wine months ago,” Ginny reminded him. “This is my wine.”

“Fine, just save me some. Now, where are those books again?”

~

**Mike:** Your books are terrible. Why do you have so many books about werewolves and fairies?

 **Ginny:** If you don’t like the werewolf romance novels, don’t read the werewolf romance novels.  
**Ginny:** Escapism is a valid coping mechanism.

 **Mike:** That sounds like something you picked up in therapy.

 **Ginny:** that’s because it is something I picked up in therapy  
**Ginny:** did you like any of them, or are you just hate-reading my books now?

 **Mike:** I liked the one about the vampire motorcycle gang.

~

“You’re being impatient,” Cara told her on Facetime, after she blurted out the whole story three days before Mike was supposed to finish quarantine and come home. “And you’re being silly.”

“I like how ‘deferred expectations’ sounds,” Ginny argued. The truth was, she was good at deferred gratification, but this wasn’t like working hard for years and eventually seeing it pay off. Now that she knew that there was something unresolved that she’d been ignoring for years, it just felt like _waiting_ for waiting’s sake. “I want to talk about it. I want to figure it out.”

“Is there any reason you can’t call him up and say, ‘Hey, Mike, you know that thing where we might be super into each other but are pretending we’re not? Let’s do something about that.’” 

Ginny grimaced, then pushed her sunglasses back on her head and stared out at the pool. “There’s, like, a hundred reasons I can’t do that.”

“Okay, name one.” Cara’s dazzling grin flashed at her before she adjusted her phone on her desk, fumbling with her open laptop.

“Maybe it’s a conversation we should have face-to-face?”

“There are approximately one thousand conversations I’ve had to do over Zoom that should have been face-to-face this year. Next.”

“What if he isn’t actually into me?”

“He dropped a casual ‘love you’ into a conversation, that’s not possible. And if you were actually afraid of rejection, you wouldn’t be a professional baseball player.”

The problem with having actual friends, Ginny realized, was that they knew her too well to let her get away with her usual smokescreen bullshit.

“Okay,” she said at last. “Maybe it’s just that I’ve had this rule about not dating players, and that was a pretty good reason not to kiss him for the last four years. Then we became friends, and now he’s _not_ a player anymore, and I’m probably a little in love with him, and I don’t know how to handle that. And I hate being stuck in my own head, trying to figure out how I’m going to handle it, so maybe it would just be easier if I had to deal with it already.”

Cara’s smile was a little too self-satisfied. “Well, there you go. You deal with it by dealing with it. Now my turn: help me pick out birthday presents for my sister’s kids.”

~

**Ginny:** do you remember my last game in 2016?

 **Mike:** The one where you sprained your elbow in your last game of your rookie season trying to get a no-hitter and scared the hell out of the whole country? That last game in 2016?

 **Ginny:** yeah, that one.

 **Mike:** 2016 was a really shitty year.

 **Ginny:** I’ve been thinking about that trip to the mound a lot lately  
**Ginny:** I told you that we weren’t going to talk about what happened until I said so, and I want you to know I really appreciate that you took that to heart.

 **Mike:** Does that mean you’re ready to talk about it?

 **Ginny:** not really  
**Ginny:** but I think we probably should

~

“Your timing is absolutely rotten, Baker,” Mike announced when he walked through the door for the first time in three months, carrying his team duffel and looking about the same as he had the day he left.

Though Ginny had spent most of the day staring at her phone, waiting for that precise moment, she still jumped up, feeling unprepared for it now that it had finally arrived. 

“Always has been,” she stuttered out, her feet feeling too-big and awkward underneath her. “I was a week and a half late when I was born.”

“Figures.” The duffel landed on the floor beside the shoes that he pulled off by the heels, a habit that Ginny’s mom had always lectured her not to do. 

She bit down on her lip to stop herself from teasing him about being in a hurry, because she knew why he was. She was in a hurry, too, to get to whatever the next stage of this was going to be. Whether it ruined everything between them, or if it somehow worked out—

All her thoughts came to an abrupt, screaming stop when Mike reached out for her face with both hands, pulling her up into a messy, eager kiss. It felt like a bookend to a hot night outside a dive bar on the last day of August. Even though she’d waited for it for years, had been living this exact moment in her dreams for months, Ginny suddenly didn’t know what to do with her hands, or her mouth.

She remembered how kissing worked at roughly the same instant the first wave of Mike’s soapy-clean smell rolled over like a rough wave overtaking her. A whimper was a perfectly reasonable reaction to getting this thing she’d wanted for far longer than she was willing to admit. Her fingers scraped Mike's scalp, and his hiss of pleasure sent a bolt of arousal to every taut nerve in her body, tensed and ready.

"Is that what you wanted to tell me about 2016?" asked Mike when he finally drew back just enough to look her in the eye. "Because that more or less sums up where I'm coming from."

"Yeah, but I feel like we're supposed to talk about this more." Ginny tried to catch her breath, but it wasn't the kind where her heart was beating too fast, and her chest seemed too tight from the sudden surge of relief and longing.

Mike's grip on her loosened, but his eyes were dark with longing when he pulled away. "We've done absolutely nothing but talk for the last three and a half months."

"But, like, this is a big change for us, isn't it?" 

"Is it?" 

"Isn't it?" Ginny's nervous laugh bubbled up out of her as Mike studied her, his forehead wrinkled up as though he was deciding what the right thing was.

"If you don't want to do this—any of it—I will absolutely not do this. If you want to do this, you have to tell me."

"I want to do this," she said immediately, because she had waited this long. Longer might kill her, and she did. She hadn't ever stopped wanting it. "And I want to talk, too."

"Ginny," he said at last. "We have talked about everything in our lives. I have been in love with you for literally years. We even talked about that."

"About not talking about it."

"Whatever. If you wanna talk, we can talk." He nuzzled into the hollow of her throat, his breath pooling in the place where her pulse beat like frantic wingbeats in a hurricane. "We will be talking tonight. And tomorrow. And every day thereafter, probably for the rest of our lives."

"And nothing is going to change?" 

Mike laughed, deep and loud, and hearty enough that Ginny felt it somewhere in her chest, rattling everything there loose. "Ginny," he said at last, cradling her face in his palms like something precious. "Everything already changed. It's going to change again. I don't care if it does, as long as I'm hanging on for the ride with you."

His eyes pleaded with her to understand, and she nodded at last, tightening her grip on his shoulders when she surged forward, her mouth crashing into his and capturing his muffled gasp of surprise.

Ginny tugged on the tuft of hair at the nape of his neck until he yielded, allowing her to tip his head back. His heartbeat thudded against her lips, pressed against the clean line where his beard ended and the vulnerable, thin skin of his throat began. When she grazed the sharp points of her teeth against him, a feral growl reverberated back against her mouth before Ginny realized that it was her.

"Fuck," Mike swore, lifting her with a singular groan of effort. He pulled her knees wide and urged them to clamp around his waist, pinning her back against the wall so he could reach the buttons of his shirt. His fingers slipped twice before he managed one of them. "Okay. Fuck."

"I've got it," she breathed into the shell of his ear, but Ginny's fingers trembled, too. 

"Talk to me." His shirt loosened and Mike wedged a thigh between her legs as he shrugged out of it. When it fluttered to the floor behind him, Ginny scraped her fingernails along his bare arms, grinding down onto hard muscle. 

"Right now?" When she could hardly remember herself, only that this was exactly what she had wanted for years? 

"Why not now?"

"Okay, fine. Okay." She sucked in a slow, steadying breath while she collected herself and organized thoughts that had scattered more and more over the past few days. She traced the hard veins of his forearms until they gave way to muscle, and then up and over his shoulders. 

“I have missed you more than anyone in the world, and I miss a lot of things lately,” she began, thinking of the postseason games she would have given almost anything to have been there for. “I miss pitching and my father. I miss road trips and the fans, and I even miss that other Ginny Baker. You know, the—”

“The one that’s for everyone else?” Mike’s laugh rumbled up from his chest, but Ginny felt it straight in her core through his leg when he pushed up against her more. 

“Yeah, her.” 

His fingers exploring the soft jersey fabric of her t-shirt until he found the hem. Then he pushed it to the side and his warm, play-rough hands brushed the sensitive skin of her belly. Ginny tensed on an inhale, then sagged against him when Mike slid his hand past the taut elastic of her waistband. 

“I missed all of that,” she went on raggedly. “But I missed you more than any of that. And as long as you're here, I can handle missing the rest of it for as long as I have to.”

“That sounds romantic,” Mike murmured into her neck. It might have sounded sarcastic to anyone else listening, but how much more did Ginny know him than she had those years before? How much better did she know that he _was_ a romantic? 

“Good,” she sighed, sliding off his knee with a regretful sigh and a playful smile when she drew him deeper into the house. “Can I show you a few more romantic things?”

~

Wake up, warm up, weights, breakfast, ten mile run.

The day started the same way it had for almost seven months. But when she finished a blistering hot shower, scrubbing herself raw and checking the alerts on her phone while toweling off, she opened the door to Mike’s palatial bathroom and found him sprawled out with sheets bunched around his waist. 

“Early start, Baker,” he grinned easily, setting aside his phone. “What do you want to do today?” 

She thought about it, then cocked her eyebrows and dropped the towel on the floor. “Let’s try something new for a change.”


End file.
